Can CPaaS Make Your Job Easier?

Are you getting a bit overwhelmed with a myriad of business applications that kinda, sorta work together but just don’t seem to give you the seamless communications that you really wish you had? Perhaps something new could help. It’s called CPaaS or Communications Platform as a Service.

What is CPaaS and Why Should I Want It?
CPaaS doesn’t replace what you have now. It extends your capabilities without having to rip out your current systems or buy new expensive hardware. CPaaS is focused on communications. It a suite of tools that plug into your existing systems to add capabilities you don’t have now or find awkward to use. Best of all, you don’t need extensive technical support to make CPaaS work. These are developer friendly APIs hosted in the cloud and available as needed.

What Can CPaaS Do?
Which API’s you elect to use may depend on the industry you are in. For instance, in healthcare you may want the ability to have video consultations for Telehealth, send appointment reminders and have secure HIPAA-compliant messaging. Financial businesses may desire 2FA authentication for secure login and chatbots to handle FAQs. Other businesses may want interactive telephone response, email updates, SMS alerts, virtual meetings and contact analytics.

Note that all of these applications are related to enchanting communications with customers, clients, supplies or team members. They are designed to fit into what you are using now without a lot of muss and fuss. You can customize your workflows and automate interactions without having to purchase, install and train on whole new systems.

The Cloud Makes It Painless
The mere thought of having to take the time and effort to dig into the systems you use every day or hire the expertise needed to do this is cringeworthy. It’s way more complexity than most companies want to deal with. Plus, once you start creating ad-hoc custom solutions, you are stuck with ongoing maintenance and upgrades and tracking who has what throughout the company.

The cloud aspect of CPaaS greatly simplifies things. All the hardware and software that makes the internals of these application interfaces function is handled by the CPaaS vendor. You are just dealing with inserting the APIs and easily customizing the user features as you desire. There are low code and no code solutions including pre-built templates to make it easy on your tech team.

What’s the Cost of CPaaS?
As a service, CPaaS is available on a pay-as-you-go basis. You decide what apps you want to deploy and to what extent. You only pay for what you use. As business conditions change, you can increase or decrease your usage as needed. There is no need for an upfront capital outlay in hardware or software.

Does Communications Platform as a Service sound like it might be something that would make your business more productive? If so, you are invited to talk with a technical expert and see what CPaaS offerings make the most sense for your situation.

Infrastructure as a Service Providers

Cloud computing is generally acknowledged to comprise three levels. These are Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). The most basic of these and the foundation of the others is infrastructure in the cloud.

Infrastructure is pretty much what it sounds like. This the basic hardware and operating system software to make it work. Competition for infrastructure in the cloud is that same infrastructure in your own data center. So, why would you want to up and move to the cloud?

There are good business reasons for IaaS. Infrastructure is expensive to buy, it requires constant attention and frequent maintenance, and it starts going obsolete almost as soon as you have it installed. Computing infrastructure is also finicky. It needs a special temperature and humidity controlled environment, physical security and fire protection, and large amounts of both operating and backup power.

There’s also the matter of how much to buy. You certainly need enough resources to accommodate your anticipated daily activities. How about the unforeseen? It’s not that unusual for a company’s product to catch on suddenly, resulting in a flurry of unexpected orders. The same is true for any content that goes viral. One day you’re coasting along at a modest level of activity. The next day the word is out and your servers are brought to their knees by a sudden flurry of new users. All of the social networking sites have experienced this phenomenon at one time or another.

Cloud service providers offer a way to address the limitations of local data centers, often with a considerable cost advantage. Cloud infrastructure providers build a business on scale. They create a large data center with racks full of virtualized and dedicated servers. These are connected with pools of disk storage, security appliances, and multiple diverse network connectivity. All of this is housed in a high security, environmentally controlled facility with both battery and generator backup power.

Doesn’t this sound like what you’d find at a colocation center? Indeed, there are many similarities between colos and cloud service providers. One major difference is in elasticity. An elastic resource is one that can grow and shrink at will. When you install your equipment in a colocation facility or rent equipment and services from them, it is on a well defined contract. Certainly, you have the ability to change your requirements as business conditions improve or degrade. But there’s going to be a time lag of days, weeks or longer to make the necessary changes.

Cloud services are based on a model of utility computing. You don’t need to ask your electric company to give you more or less power. You simply turn equipment on and off. Only when your requirements exceed the maximum capacity you have installed, do you need to ask for a different level of service.

Infrastructure as a Service is based on a pay for what you use basis. The cloud service provider has far more servers, disk drives, Gbps of bandwidth and other resources that you can possibly use. Their economy of scale dictates that they serve many customers, each of whom has no awareness of the presence of the others. Your services are partitioned so that no other user will take your resources or interfere with your operation.

The advantage to business users is that IaaS gives them the resources they need, when they need them, at a cost that reflects actual usage and not spare installed capacity. Capital investments and perhaps difficult to obtain financing are not required. Staffing levels are reduced because the service provider takes care of operations and maintenance on a 24/7/365 basis.

Could your business benefit from using some or many cloud services? You can have a good basis to compare with what you are doing now by getting prices and services from cloud computing providers now.